Tag: conspiracy theory

This is an attempt at visualizing different conspiracy theories. The visualization tries to show interconnectedness of actors, organizations and concepts in each one, so a network graph was chosen as a mode of presentation. The presented theories are: The Antigravity Drive, Chemtrails, The Cabal (American deep state from JFK assassination to 9/11), The Illuminati/New World Order, and the most recent, the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappearance. In a way, it’s a progression from the previous network visualization about the PRISM scandal, which was once also considered a conspiracy theory.

I chose this topic because those theories always attracted me as a means of alternative explanation of things that I couldn’t understand in official versions of events. That is not to say that I necessarily believe in any of them. For example, I’d be hard pressed to believe in the Moon Landing Hoax theory, which I first included here because of relative ease of gathering source material, but later discarded because of its relatively low value. The Flt 370 theory has extremely low credibility too, and I wonder what I’ll think when this post is a year old.

A conspiracy, according to Wikipedia ” … may also refer to a group of people who make an agreement to form a partnership in which each member becomes the agent or partner of every other member and engage in planning or agreeing to commit some act.“. This is a pretty broad definition. It can apply to a government, a company, or every group of people who are trying to further an agenda, be it good or bad for their natural or social environment. But anything labelled as a conspiracy almost always has an evil association, for example “A civil conspiracy or collusion is an agreement between two or more parties to deprive a third party of legal rights or deceive a third party to obtain an illegal objective.” (Wikipedia – civil conspiracy), or “In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.” (Wikipedia – criminal conspiracy).
A conspiracy theory is therefore an attempt at explaining a real or imagined conspiracy. In this sense, even official stories of various incidents are conspiracy theories, unless they are well founded in evidence and irrefutable facts. In a free society, a kind of market then forms of conspiracy theories, in which those with better means, but also more vested interests, compete for public’s attention with other bodies of citizenry, whose interests and aims can differ significantly. For example, a government can execute a false flag attack, as the Nazis did in Poland at the beginning of WW2, and spin a theory that the other party did it, in order to go to war and grab land. The public may then be motivated to concoct a variety of counter theories with various motives – simply seeking the truth, overthrowing the government by exposing the lies it tells, furthering some commercial agenda, for example selling books, or purely personal paranoid agendas, which serve no one else than the authors and their need to sustain their delusions.
Let me briefly explain the theories I used in this visualization. First two are quite believable.

The Cabal: the story of American deep state and events from JFK assassination to 9/11 attacks

The Antigravity Drive

The Henge – a test site for Die Glocke?

A story of how the Nazi regime allegedly developed a form of anti gravity propulsion in total secrecy, made possible by a strictly compartmentalized environment, imposed on the German war production efforts by the SS. The technology was then seized by the US military and other allies after the war and developed further in utmost secrecy. The first such machines ever seen were so-called foo fighters. These balls of light, sighted and documented by various US Air Force pilots, flew in parallel with bombers and fighter planes, and frequently executed seemingly impossible air maneuvres. Also mentioned is a mythical machine The Glocke (The Bell), which ran on red mercury and was responsible for death of several scientists due to extreme radiation it produced, and the discoveries of Viktor Schauberger. His implosion engine, which drew heavily on vortex physics, was allegedly successful, and produces two flying prototypes. The US military immediately grabbed and classified much of this work, and it stays secret until now. It’s said to be employed in B-2 bomber and various flying craft sighted around Area 51 in Nevada. The story also goes to mention modern experiments in anti gravity physics, notably performed by Evgeniy Podkletnov, which allegedly succeeded in reducing gravity over a spinning superconducting electromagnet for two percent.

Illuminati / New World Order

Illuminati / NWO

How a handful of secret societies dominate the world. The plot allegedly has its roots in The Bavarian Illuminati society, started in the eighteen century by Adam Weisshaupt. They were eradicated, but some claim they survived in a covert form, forging an alliance with international bankers. Most big world events since then were planned in advance, among them both the advent of Communism, Nazism and Zionism, World Wars, and the third too. Says Pike: “The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil.”

In recent times, the organizations that further Illuminati goals are Council for Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers. Here are some books: The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction by Mark Dice, and The Illuminati original by Adam Weisshaupt.

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappearance

Boeing 777 (symbolic picture)

A recent theory about the whereabouts of the missing plane. On it, there seemed to be an awful lot of technical personnel, involved in developing military hardware. They supposedly worked for a company named Freescale Semiconductors, which was in a patent wrestle with the Rothschild family. Acording to the story, Israeli agents and elements of US military hijacked the plane and secretly flew it to Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean to debrief the experts and possibly use the plane in another 9/11-style attack in the future.

Construction and visualization of visualization networks

A few words for technologically minded. The networks were constructed by text-mining the source material, isolating known entities in sentences by means of massive dictionaries, connecting them in subnetworks (each sentence – one subnetwork), and finally adding them in the master network for that topic. Only sentence-length subnetworks were constructed, although it would be probably more fruitful to connect entities in paragraphs too. That would yield a too convoluted master network, so I stayed with sentences for clarity.

The dictionaries were automatically generated from source texts, then edited, Many synonyms had to be added, since my dictionary generating technique relies more on brute force than on semantic aspects of text. Again, the connections are not semantic, which means that if there was a sentence “The Illuminati are NOT connected with the CFR”, Illuminati and CFR would still be connected. Here I’m relying on the power of statistics: in majority of sentences there mostly appear connected entities. For the minority in which they are not, the bonds between them are too weak to influence the big picture.

I did try to process volumes of texts with a natural language processing framework, namely Apache OpenNLP, but got frustrated with the amount of work that would be needed for this little hobby project. I’d need to train the classifiers to extract named entities, which is no small feat, and I’d probably not use them again. To gain some insight in types of connections between these entities, I tried parsing the sentences into parse trees, then extract relationships, but parsing tech is not very accurate. It would probably do, again relying on power of statistics, but the sheer amount of relationship types would add little to visual value of the graphs, so I decided that I’d do this with a simpler project first. The logic I wrote is still in project source code, so if anyone is interested, mail me (About page) and I’ll send it your way. Same goes for the graph files and the categorized dictionaries.

Finally, the topic networks were exported as subgraphs, so that every node in the network is represented by a subgraph. These subgraphs are added into – or removed from – the master graph by the client. The networks in Browser are managed by sigma.js. Preliminary analysis was done in Gephi, I recommend Network Graph Analysis and Visualization with Gephi by Ken Cherven.

Additionally, geographic entities were extracted for each node. These are represented on a small map in the bottom of the screen. Map is managed by d3.js.

Interacting with visualization

There are two modes – reading the story or exploring on your own. Switch between them by clicking a button on top right of the graph. While read the story, the graph will change in real time as you scroll the text down. If you choose to explore, you can click on terms, and their subgraphs will be interactively added to the master graph.

Clicking on a graph node will expand it (load its associated nodes and display them, if previously not loaded), or delete it, if it was already loaded, at the same time showing the text from which its existence was text-mined.

There’s no way for the user to control the map. It’s there for informative and decorative purposes.